Not all AE’s are created equal
The AE’s you want, and don’t want, for your startup
Welcome to Issue 4 of Cyber Building Blocks. Each week, I share one newsletter focused on helping you build a Go To Market engine for your cybersecurity startup.
Not what used to work 20 years ago, but what’s working today. Remember, I’m building side by side with you!
Recruiting at a startup is hard. Recruiting for an early sales hire is even harder!
Think about it. Most founders in cyber are technical, they’ve never built a sales team before so they don’t have the experience to know what an average vs good vs great seller looks like!
Maybe you aren’t even a founder but a new sales leader and you don’t have a ton of hiring experience either. You kinda fall in the same bucket!
And guess what, sales people are trained to sell, that includes being able to sell themselves during an interview process!
You will leave those early interviews feeling like you just stumbled upon the best seller in the whole industry and they can flop 9 months later and you spent a decent amount of your runway to be stuck in the same spot but now with upset investors…
Being great at selling, and hiring great salespeople are two very different skillsets!
Most founders and early stage sales leaders make the same mistakes!
If you look closely you can see it all the time!
You are disrupting a niche (Remember we spoke about that last week!) aspect of endpoint security so what do you do, you go find “top” sellers from Crowdstrike and SentinelOne to join you and help you have the same success!
But quickly those sellers don’t seem to have the same success they did at the larger platform they were previously selling!
Or maybe the founders closed their first few customers by getting warm introductions through their network or VC introductions, so they naturally will want to find an AE that has tons of relationships from selling into the industry for the last several years!
I see it happen time and time again, I almost break out in hives when I hear a founder ask about a “rolodex” during an interview! It screams that they do not understand how GTM really works!
They look for an AE with a resume chalked full of “President’s Club” and “176% Quota Attainment” and “#1 Rep in the Company” but don’t understand that the AE had a full SE team, sales enablement support, product marketing collateral, competitive intel team, a well respected brand, and a full channel ecosystem built around them helping them be successful!
At your startup, they won’t have any of that… so expecting that not to be a little shocking for them, isn’t smart.
Don’t make the mistakes of so many and just look for big logo’s, quota attainment numbers, and a rolodex and think that is the perfect hire!
That seller could be incredible, but probably not at an early stage startup!
Startups have very little structure, specifically on the GTM side of the house!
The founding team usually is technical and from a security background so they build the product and engineering orgs on a much stronger foundation than the skin and bones that sales, marketing, customer success, and channel is built.
PS - Building product is not building GTM. If I see another Product Manager saying they built GTM on LinkedIn I’m gonna lose it…
Finding an AE that is resourceful is crucial!
Knowing that when they ask for a new whitepaper, it might be on them to utilize ChatGPT, current blog content, and get the first draft themselves and then just review it with folks internally, not ask others to draft it from scratch.
Another big difference about startup selling vs big company selling is when you are disrupting a niche, you need to be very clear on what aspects you are solving, and what you are not!
To the endpoint example I started with, there will be a TON of things that Crowdstrike will do that you don’t do and don’t plan on building anytime soon! If your sales hires can’t communicate where you fit and where Crowdstrike would be a better fit, you will find yourself in a handful of opportunities that you really have no business trying to win! It’ll just burn through resources.
Early stage selling is very consultative and educational in nature!
This leads to the number one trait you need to be hiring for when hiring for your startup!
Any guesses so far?
Technical acumen. You need a salesperson that can have a technical level discussion.
Specifically the ability to understand where your product fits, and just as important, where it doesn’t!
When you are on early calls, you don’t always have the SE resources, you don’t always have the ability to schedule a follow up call to bring in the founder to help out.
You need to be able to do discovery, and not just high-level discovery but understand the foundational aspects of their tech stack and how deploying your solution would work, the key integrations and why they might push back on each one.
You don’t just need to understand what your product does, but what about the other players in your niche, what about the big platform players that are on the fringes, what about how it fits into overall cybersecurity strategy more broadly.
Those are the conversations you need to be able to have as a cybersecurity seller to really do well!
At massive companies you might have teams to support you on every technical component so you just handle the “relationship” but that’s not the case at a startup, and to be honest that’s not the case for the best AE’s even at big public companies!
The best sellers can handle the relationship, and play a big role in the technical discussion!
The time of making the introduction and handing it over to an SE for the entire call is over.
Especially in cybersecurity!
Here’s what I’m trying this week: Remember I’m in the trenches building just like you
This is the exact stage we are in right now at the startup I am building. We are about to start hiring more AE’s so it’s super important that I make sure those are the best AE’s for us in our stage!
And that might be a different kind of seller than those that Palo Alto Networks or Check Point need right now and that’s okay!
In addition to technical acumen, there are a handful of other traits that i’ve personally really grown to rely on when hiring specifically at an early stage startup:
I need to be able to trust this person. Yes this means I would love to have worked with them previously! That joint work experience really helps me understand how they are in front of customers, and how they react to stress.
I need them to solve more problems than they identify. At startups identifying problems is easy, there will always be things we can do, ideas we can try. But the best ideas are those we are actually able to execute on.
I need them to be an incredible teammate. The team is small and one bad apple can ruin the culture extremely quickly. I’ve seen this happen first hand and it basically means the whole company has to start over while you clean house.
Technical, Trust, True Bias to Action, Teammate
Those 4 T’s can really build a solid foundation as we continue to scale!
I’m always looking to connect with those that I believe have those traits because you never know when you are going to have an opening that you need to fill with those building blocks!
That’s all for this week’s newsletter,
Keep fighting the good fight!
Konnor
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